KEN L. JONES POETRY PAGE

This page features poetry written by Ken L. Jones. Although he has been writing professionally for over thirty years and does every kind of writing you can imagine from comic books to doctoring movie scripts Ken L. Jones considers himself first last and always a poet which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t find time to write a lot of horror and other genre style short stories too.  He’s especially interested in any comments you would care to make about these poems and would also be interested in seeing any poetry that you might like to publish here too.

Get Some Blood

 

The moon comes tapping like a blind man

While something that is giddy as it stalks me

Leaves threats written in lipstick

Upon the leaves of every tree

As dark ruddy and crumbling

The very stars in the sky fall ill at all that is about to happen

Once my blood begins to spill

And then in a pitch black darkness

That seems to be going the wrong way

Something vaguely humanoid falls on me like prey

Brandishing an oddly lit pair of scissors

That breathes plagues of runic symbols

In the splatters on my chest on this masked and foggy evening

When every bird song has become a lament

And then I am dispatched unceremoniously

To that final and most impersonal of all continents

Where the black feathers of sleep are eternal

And the scent of winter knows no rest

Once one has descend the musty smell of a maze of stairs

Sleeping off its feed that arises in the place I always knew I was headed for

But of whose very existence I have long refuse to conceive

 

Midnight Swirl

 

Unlocked hallucinations on chocolate horses

Caused no chance to sleep to begin to bleed

As the crumbling concrete city shadowboxed

Ready to shed its Lou Reed mannequins by night

As the tinted ragged massacres continued to replicate

Eternal unfamiliar and brandishing a lethal wand

In my ruined ancestral home which though forsaken

Still in the night looms on and on

Strange Sleep

 

Once while on the dripping shores of falling down stairs

As murmuring toads crooned in dark pre-human corners turned all septic

Once while floating down the decomposing river

That had aligned its calendar so that it could sleepwalk with the berserk undead

Came unto me a pale presence of crawly bacteria

That was reversed engineered from the chocolate covered unthinkable end time fears

As surreal and dreamlike as the mined scrap metal

Which died from eating pop rocks

Then was beheaded with one clean stroke

And which now moans and wails like multiple personalities

So robot voiced as it reads my last rites while hissing in my ear

Like a snake that leaves bloody scratches in its wake

As it crawls back into a hole in the very blackest part of the night

 

 

 Vaporous Recoiling

  I am between all worlds and

Intangible when I am asleep

Exiled to the Isle of Silence

Where the remembered past

Flits out to sea like the

Flying Dutchman’s ghost at last

And high above bandstands

Covered with swirling snow

I can see my breathe in that air

So full of lace

As all the gold flaked streets below

Become a music box make of ice cream and cake

And in this October which was once gray

But now fades to pallid red

I board the unsettling train

Whose brain patterns become my hammer

And like a caterpillar folding in on itself

I find that my heart has been neatly pieced

By an arrow made of mistletoe

During this midnight so like a Frankenstein’s Monster

Where the last thing I hear is the growling of un-glimpsed dogs

While the Reaper plays a poisoned violin

In the dimness of a Hanson cab

That he beckons me to climb in so that I can ride along.

Curious Boundaries

  The ghosts of my secret hours are full of the wormwood eyes

Of a grotesque parade in a lonely house

Pale unearthly frail, so somber as it sings itself to sleep

And it is surrounded by a dark bygone landscape all dressed up in tatters

That is constantly haunted by the morbidity of twilight

Where a nightmare dressed as a cackling jester

Wanders the icy winter winds forever

With no clues to its true paternity but the chiseled letters

On a tombstone in a graveyard that few still visit

But which the dead there now have no choice but to call home

And for all of eternity from it they will never more roam

 

 

Chaff From The Layers Of My Thoughts

  

A botched morning vanishes

And the fetus of the slimy tapestry

Of my baffled nap floats away

Like last night’s constellations

That became a flock of bats

Who flickered and twinkled

Like needles and gore

And were so feral and dirty

As they came out of their oozing crypts

Shifting and ancient and pumping

Like human hearts and yet brilliant

As they showed up on my doorstep

Like autumn being announced

By the presence of a severed goat’s head

As it delivered unto me a most chilling proclamation

That I would soon be murdered by the dead

And so as lycanthropic night sinks its claws into me

Something plodding, something slow

Something that was not at all what I expected

A true grotesquery of great despair came unto me

And I was as unprepared for it

As I was for my first EC Horror comic so long ago

And as it lunged for me out of the glue like darkness

Something smelt in a hunger for the moon

Harvested my humanity and took me with it

After promising me that I’d be returning soon

And so through earth and coffin wood I tear

A’waiting to fulfill the terrible potential

Of this my most unwanted second birth

As I become one whose name is legion

Restless and doomed through all of eternity

To wander this wretched earth most unceasing.

Dead, Dead

 

In the sinister groove of the swirl of what continues to haunt

In a weightlessness dark and smoky

The way girls dance when freed of death

Has a certain black and relentless menace

And in the base urges that are spreading

I am at last discovering and forgetting

And as all that unleashes while lurking

Easily takes me to clawing imperfect monstrous evil

And then all that is female before me is soon dead

Out like flickering candles in the basement that

Such deeds are done in

Down through all the homeless centuries

Then sleep at last sleep

Comes on and out of nowhere

Upon me and I find that this beautiful garden

Where I gladly shed my humanity in

Is but a dream, a tease

An eternal torment

In the insane madhouse that is my conformity

And I’m back once again in the real world

Where sorrow pulls the trigger

While the moon it breaks my bones

For daring to try to escape too early

From the imprisonment of my flesh/blood home

 

 

Sour Shadows

 

Terrible thoughts scramble in static

That has a ghostly glow

And while thunder crashes on the beachfront

Of my troubled slumber

Where far away voices tick like a clock

That emanate from former human beings

Still on the prowl for all kinds of reasons

And all of them unsettling

With a hunger for I wonder not

I realize that the world has changed forever

As all becomes what was foretold so long ago

In this time of all debts settled

By fingernails and fangs and mouths that foam

In that wine cask of a mirror

Where we all lose our shadows

And where hallucinations become our jesters

Making us laugh so hard at the human condition

That we have to slash either someone else’s throat

Or slash our own

In that place where Venus gets mutilated

By something whose father was an ape

But these days pretends that just isn’t so

 

 

Lines Written By The Mulled Wine Of Moonlight

 

Upside down creatures with red fangs

In disappearing wheat fields full of the dead in coffins

The clouds overhead are a crossroads

Whose delicious blood has been drained

By apparitions that have emerged

From a fever in some lunatic’s brain

The thirst of my fingerprints for a soft young throat

Was their final bequest

I think I remember that as I look in the mirror

Where what stares back at me

Is more Venus flytrap than it is man

And now the lower Alps are orange and very somber

Just long slashes of stained silhouettes

Where shadows stir in their deep sleep

Sailor shadows that take me to port cities

That have marks upon their necks

 

 

 

Become The Monster

 

Woke up in a ghastly skull

Obeying without question

The streets where dogs bark

Like a red gouged wound

As something even more elder

Called out to me in anger

To bring forth a blighted crop

That would blink and twitch

When exposed to even

The normal sunlight of high noon

One that would douse the world

In the most awful of sleep walking lullabies

And as I slid across this rusting dream’s fissures

Past shadows like an oriental garden

That caused the very fog itself to tremble

As I performed the impossible

And slit a throat once I held up the beard

Of a dream beneath an autumn moon

That was wearing an obsidian tuxedo

By a dim light that was so vacantly evil

And one which had low bestial drooling lips

That congratulated me with a voice

That sounded like a hive of chimpanzees

As I became the recipient of its most awful of gifts

A guarantee that I would live forever

As long as each night the fuel

That powers the human body was drained

And swallowed by me in gulps and sips

That were taken even when not freely given

By a child, a mister, or a miss

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tentacles Of Straw

 

Yet another incoherent night has awakened me

Like my drink of choice

As the young ones gather around

The scarecrow of the new October morn

Their crooked mouths full of this day of wonder

That long in the belly of centuries has stewed and stirred

Until it was codified and civilized in rituals that most

Christian pulpits do not bother to speak out against anymore

And though the fall leaves no longer sop up the human blood

That in once the future could be read

And though giant wicker men no longer burn

And no hearts are torn out nor lost

And none anymore lose their heads

Still there’s something thrilling in what is left

And in all that still lingers there

And so once again I salute this amazing harvest

Of strange feelings that tingles

Oh how it tingles

In the coagulation of the air

 

 

 

Still Mutating 

 

Infant midnight lingers in the faded poison

It has bestowed upon an old harbor

That has red eyes whose waves are like

The rotten corpses of horses as they break

In counterpoint to the morose pan flute music

Of the venom of the rain

And while my blasphemous dreams so serpentine

Slit its throat on a pool table

That reddens with blood stains

 Few will suspect that in the daylight hours

They are casually brushing past the one who every policemen

Wishes that he could divine my address and my name

 

 

Carved Up Movies

 

October has the strangest handwriting

As it is scrawled upon the first snow

Until it gets ripped apart by the bite marks

Of the dreadful mutant shapes

As I lay in my bed of wonders

Choking on the stench of vapors

Formless yet still swirling

As I descend into the freshly dead

In a blur of slaughter sound tracked

By a whirring that I have never met

And then in the groping voices

Of those brief shredded seconds dim

Unfamiliar windows with all the darkness

Of some machine took moonlight

From the dead of night

And formed a room of bent up spoons

That was adrift in amber scents

Then as long lacerations of vegetation

Swirled and swallowed me

Until I asked how could I not be dreaming

As I unlocked the alleyway of why we are dead

And was torn apart by voices

Whose frozen spasms pushed me down a flight of stairs

Whose transformation is still breathing

Like a face that has been clawed

Where I remain now enslaved to the cane fields

Of my baffled bewilderment nothing now

But a traveling chamber of horrors

Re-gathered around the eerie laugh of

The Shadow who confesses to the gypsy girl

Like a silver bullet even as I am

Strangled by the restraining straps

Of all that I ever said in vain

And with such ease that I never now can take back.

 

Ken L. Jones

 

 

The Humming Of Refrigerators

 

Terror on a darkened tooth filled pulsating moor

Is but a syringe full of those endless nights of festering

Like a head boiling in a pot more slimy and rancid

Than the flesh of a harvest time plucked out of a dream

Of such malevolent pollution illuminated by the blood

That makes the drums thump in the tell tale

Barnum and Bailey shadows where the fierce rhythms

Of my own inhuman toil scratched down in secret rotten journals

Seized from the skeletal ribcage of Castle Frankenstein

After I had awakened in an ice cave’s corpse like tissue

Where the lunatic’s buzz saw clutched in his hairy paws

Oozed over me like retorts of dripping chemicals

That I sipped like wine as I got down every sensation

Every pain, every thought I wish I had never enunciated

And never want to read again stitched together

And sewn up as on two distinctly different feet

They arise in an empty hallway that called to me

By name where chilled out information from the dead

Tuned out the visions that danced in my head

Till I was only capable of the most hallucinatory

Of speech as I stood revealed as a Pleasure Island bad boy

A burning windmill who can no longer even bend the bars

Off the simplest cages and yet I will still try to convince you

That I can if only to express my boundless rage

At this species known as man.

 

Ken L. Jones

And Now That The Horror Has Truly Begun

 

The dead guys are on the move in the pale legs of the rain

There’s an odor of shadows in the porcelain mist

Where there’s always a certain beauty lurking

In the halfway wet dense slaughter where only scotch tape
Holds together all that gasps and is bleeding out

And daylight is ever but a gnarly silhouette

And there my remorse is headless and bubbling and dangling

Like coughed up blood swirling as rusty and mesmerized as severed fingers

Like a frightened rabbit cut through skin that is dribbled like a dream

In the darkness of a hotel room that will never again be clean.

 

 

 

Leave It Alone In The Dark

 

By a river that had a brain aneurysm

The dreams that the dead have in a softening morgue
Are zombie squishy and so moist mere pencil sketches

Of blood soaked fevers clockwork and muffled like a scary face

Born aloft on a saddle as incomprehensibly weird

And with all the awkwardness of a reanimated corpse

And layered like some delusional montage of the bottom nether realms

Whose glaring boulevards peeled back the skins of a mental asylum

That was disguised by the spilt ink mask

Of he who was known as the Red Orchid Mad Hatter

 

 

The Canticle Of The Conquerors

 

Midnight’s constellations are burned and foul

And have given rise to fetuses made of moonlight in the infected night

And now as eight-legged sleep comes upon us

Like a plague of secrets as the darkness continues to spin its web

Please remember that we came to your planet in the act of mutating

For we have surfed across the stars on strange blood sucking winds

To impart our thirst until it became the most paramount of all of mankind’s desires

As we laid it like shivering eggs inside of your human brains

And now you’re sleeping cities are one long nightmare

Where we may openly play and reign

 

 

Hell Being…

 

Sleep laughed on the night that we dozed off like a television set

A vague feeling like something out of a tall tale

I’m dreaming all this while I’m still awake

And it has footprints like a silver bullet

And is like the vegetable that grew vocal chords

That is even now scratching at my front door

Raving like the fragments of a shattered mirror

Floating like a fevered heartbeat with the textures of a burned out candle

And it has long slumbered in the porcelain lochs

That are like a star lit dream where scarlet children

With haggard faces and corpses in sack cloth creep in shadows putrid and murky

Doing a dance that feeds on the dead and long asleep in all that their master wishes

In the curdled stillness of what he rules by virtue of being long cast down

With all evil resting on his head like the universe’s heaviest crown

And some dare wonder why he frowns.

Blood Frieze

Ken L. Jones

 

Once in a wasp’s nest of a secluded cabin

All tattered and torn with a jeweler’s precision

Where I went down the rabbit hole

With my sepia tinged bone saw

To create a lullaby beneath a pier

That had lost its memory

Where with my claws I tore off

The face of this blasphemous supermarket

Until I became an identical twin of the night

Who most enjoyed the rides that fear me

As my joy buzzer jolt emerged from a meteorite

Of all that I was indeed pushed into being

By  a world that would not leave me alone

And so though it was never my original intention

They leave me no choice but

To wear their flesh and stew their bones

 

 

Unfathomed

Ken L. Jones

 

My dreams die and become all bones

While I climb the stairs to the voices in my head

That shift like a Rubik’s Cube in the scalding hot musty mansion

That was like an old manuscript I’ve never read

Where was unleashed a creature covered in midnight’s blood

With only brain scooping butchery on its mind

Who I first met years ago while on a blinding pilgrim

To a cornfield in a region I can no longer find

Except in the soft voice that you use to speak

To mental patients hoping to keep them calm

Till out of nowhere they scratch out your eyes

While humming a giggling song

 

Red Blade

Ken L. Jones

 

Night has an orgasm in the snow

Then minutes pass in fun house silence

As all that was sacrificed on the metamorphosis altar

Of an alleyway becomes a beautiful poem

To the slow trickle of the gutters full of garbage

That are the firstborn of places of great knowledge

How blissfully nimble is the edge of my knife blade

As it dances a ballet across the red tongue of Halloween night

As all screams in terror till in the white noise

Of long after I have gone to sleep

All glitters like a pair of moving scissors

Cutting through the most forbidden of all meats.

 

 

Neither Human Nor Beast

Ken L. Jones

 

My dream disrobes underneath her skin

And with my revenge my night is complete

Dead voices calling out in back alleyways and strip joints

Abandoned in all that is ugly and deformed

As I sit upon a swamp throne backwards

While all that I’ve long kept bottled up

Inside of me comes pouring out

Like it was getting out of a clown car

Even as the death dealing that throbs in my bones

Illuminates the bridge that connects the musical chairs

That bleed with my vengeance as it explodes

Like a piñata in a midnight diner that has sharp teeth.

Rubble And Soot

Ken L. Jones

 

After hours in the embrace of sleep

I give way to the light of forgotten dreams

Which have a wild rhythm chosen at random

But I couldn’t complete their processes and ancient meanings

And oh they were full of twisted murderous desires

Told in the agony of the ugliest of words

And all seen as if trapped under some arctic ice floe

Like the ghost dancing a jig

Like some kind of a demon

Grinning a smile of great rapture

And there dark frightening secrets were revealed

That made the Jack The Ripper slayings

And Count Dracula pass by as if they were clouds

And all of this took place in foothills as ageless as Dorian Grey

Where stories are forever told by dead people

Until bad mojo gets all loose

And takes us all to the most pregnant of low lit places

Where we end up a brittle hymn

To getting taxidermied and become

Yet merely yet another painting by John Wayne Gacy

That dissolves into a vanishing flock of crows

As twilight slides to sunset in the valley below

 

 

 

And Here’s The Feast

Ken L. Jones

 

Angel wings rising from a stream made of human skin

Covered in black ink that had a heartbeat

Till all was swallowed up in the long time din

Of corpses when they start to decompose

In the dark recesses of night’s long menacing whip

Where a headless coachman

Who is all frost who is all fear

Speaks like re-spliced television screens

Till Kurt Cobain nor not even the mighty Stephen King himself

Can get through the flesh eating doors

Of the forbidden cities of my hallucinations

Where I adore and I kiss the peyote

That is Fritz Lang’s Metropolises’ lips

And as I fashion a chessboard out of

The oncoming sepia toned darkness

Of the bruised and undead setting sun

That comes on all Candyman nibble

As it attaches an ape’s brain

To the black centipede hieroglyphics
That collapse like imploding stars

As they start to slowly fade

After they first go all demur

Then do linger with a dismemberment

That will never return to my living room

Which speaks with a gravelly whisper

That is heard only by my rock garden

Which is being milked by something

That has to do with the dead

Which well explains why it has become

Such a place of ultimate dread 

 

I’m A Swirling

Ken L. Jones

 

We were repelling magnets numbed with pain

Whose end game like a glistening black orchid prism

Had all the innocent trepidation of old churches

Where I dreamt of an end of the world

That was sensual and lavacious

As she stripped down to her buttery biscuit

Until I became like some spacewalking fetus

Euthanized  and dissected and yet still expected

To sing Oh Danny Boy while all of this was going on

Till I sent out a bat signal that melted like a serrated fever

And brimstone monkeys armed with red hot sizzling cast iron frying pans

Rode like the cavalry to my rescue as I collected all their most toxic urges

In a jewel box but still couldn’t’ get no satisfaction from all of the tainted hallelujahs

That have haunted me like ectoplasm with their dark hues

And so now I’m all anger and regrets coiling in a thorn bed of great distortion

Where glue sniffing and fragile I remain murky and barely louder than a whisper

An undulating sitar that just wants to slip away like some shimmering blood splattered bird

Into the forever of repeat, repeat,repeat .

 

 

 

That Death Might Come

Ken L. Jones

 

 

Like every day of my life

I came in at the end

And woke up next to

The dead girl who always came

With all my childhood dreams

And then deprived of

What scatter shot sleep I was capable of

My creeping sense of dread unleashed arias

Of riled up rudderless psychotic glee

While vomiting up shattered bathroom mirrors

While I stumbled about in visions

That were like toxic waste

With a swallowed up fear that ate me alive

Until I was nothing more than a scarred

Jack in the box adrift in hidden malevolence

And on the road to nothing after being newly released

From a psychiatric hospital by special decree of the Red Queen

And bone dry after my long interment

And jonesing for the ichor which is the only thing

Which satisfies me or ever probably did.

 

 

 

 

What Was Left of the Candle

 

The was an uneasy chilled wind blowing

Through my late night television

Where dreamily I saw all the colors

Of the poisoned landscape there

As the unfathomable once again spoke to me

Like it first did long ago when it rode in on a comic book store

Like some nonhuman creature

That for the millionth time diamond encrusted

And anciently lobster like poured over me

Like heavy rain upon an art museum

And in the ungodly silence of it all

I became but the dirt of a cornfield

That had started to bleed

And as the bones of its flickering candlelight

Festered inside of me like an helium breathing midnight

That could even give goose bumps to

The Flying Dutchman’s sails as they twitched in the breeze

Until it lit down on the snow dusted footprints

That curl beneath the street lamps

Like a rusted furnace glowing a green

That could make a planet fall out of its orbit

As it reaches up into a sky that has grown ravenous

Then hangs in the air like a scrapbook

Of all the misdeeds that I have ever committed

In an impenetrable fog that was talking backwards at the time

And when I was done and my hands were unclean

I stumbled off with all the muggy disorientation of a ghost

Into a daybreak that was now full of abnormalities

Whereas I sought my succor on the fevered terraces

Of a most perpetual and shape shifting sleep

I just smiled like the false colors of a brigand

As an archipelago of unbelievable silence

Greeted my long wandering and foot sore feet

As it provided me with wine and meat. 

 

 

I Can’t Remember Me

 

The mist shrouded shores of my baroque delirium

Wane with impulses both impeding and unchecked

And blood thirsty and irresistible is my flickering mercy

As it shatters into shards of the most fearsome of dreads

As I arise with the night from my crystal mausoleum

That gives off an effluvia that reeks of a most apocalyptic musk

Till at dawn my somehow still perambulating bones

Must be returned because of daylight’s intimidating pause

To my native soil where temporarily freed from my lust

I enter a coma as gentle as Skull Island

All though the brightly colored afternoon

Till by the first tendrils of moonlight

I am revived to feast slowly and with great savor

On the Earth’s serene and unconscious children

Sweeter even then Mrs. Lovett’s pies 

 

 

Love Note to Ms Shelley

 

In the half extinguished convulsive movements of infinite and devoured forms

Is a catastrophe most devastating whose watery shriveled eyes disappeared into ice floes 

Made monstrous and lonely as the disappearance of a wedding night

 As seen through the arctic wastes of a cabin window far out to sea

Where Faust is at last revealed as your aristocratic suitor

Who wears snatches of the guilty mask of heartbreak

And where the first time we touched

In the frosty forget and forgive of your hand drawn fable

That legendary book of mishaps and unjust juju

Long aspired to by the bewildered jester who was the creature

As he plucked the various strings that flickered behind his heavily hooded eyes

Creeping and whispering while his heart beat out an inarticulate rhythm

That was stitched together from his almost human fears

By a pit of sulfur scientist who thought that he could manufacturer

The soul of a man that could contain and quantify

The philosophic aspects of human loneliness but do to most inexpert craftsmanship

And the mishap of a criminal brain frozen in a block of underground cannibalistic pools

Announced the approach of a sad victim though not quite a will-less zombie

Restored to an abnormality that is uncontrolled with prayers

In an evil laboratory of offerings most dangerous and so malevolent

That none could control its grisly hands joined at the waist

As it lived in the hole that had assumed a most terrifying form

That is easily explained in the body of a hideous man-eating fairy tale

That became an old legend as it arrived on America’s shores

With such shocking repercussions that it forgot that it originated in the treetops

Of the hookah hallucinations of a lonely young woman wandering and departing in the clouds

From a castle on a lake till she with a ballerina’s movements

That were like the undead cries of her lost children

Wrote it down for the astonishment of poets

Then planted it in the ground and what came forth on the printed page sent all literature into a rage

And thus was set the stage for all that since has passed

And that is still as beautiful down through these centuries as the features of this demure lass

Who rocked the cradle that brought forth what a scalpel can revive but not abort

And which will forever creep by lightning’s light through imagination’s night

And which has long been the only cloak that offers me

Any comfort from this world of sin if not any discernible warmth

 

To The Unknowing Eye

 

There is blood on all the blaring sirens

That leap from the shadows of all lynchings

Like a nightmare made from scratch

And as I try to tiptoe across this landscape

Of black scissors and grim futures

That have turbaned footprints

All is uncertain and mercurial

Like a dark cramped cul-de-sac

Where a partly demonic Ouija board

Is moving of its own handwritten accord

As it lays on the long un-mowed yard

Of a house of darkness that long ago died

By its own hand and which now dances with

The supernatural events that have the foulest odors

And the psycho son of all these transparent echoes

Left behind by people with purposes unknown

This thing with eyes bulging up towards the bottom

That has fallen out

Slithers forward with a terrifying roar

Like a bedwetting nightmare

That you had when you were four

Obviously flesh hungry even though he lacks a face

As he begins speaking a strange language

In a way that leaves me weak

Until I zoom down a hallway of screams

That spins the wheel of my shattered sanity

And leaves me having seizures

And babbling about how the things run amok

Have a very old coat of paint

On that unwanted day when the mysterious drops on you

And you become the saint of this ghost ship floating

Where they long ago cut the wires

To what little we cycloptian know

In this world that each day resembles

Nothing so much as some lost episode of the Twilight Zone

 

 

 

 

A Punt Down Fever River

Night comes on as the heroin tracks of the pouring rain

Cast menacing shadows in the oblivion of it’s disconnect

That cause everyone’s face to become a creeper

As they crawl and bark in your collapsing veins

I won’t be going to that party

Lit only by the neon mistakes of a darkness

That has so many layers as it bristles in the inky black

Of suffering seizures during the ferocious seconds

That flail like a squid giving birth to a satanic creature

And one who appears to be their messiah at that

And nightmares that died alone in the street

Get chopped up inside of my head

The hot gravy blood flowing off the knife

Has a underwater sound

And I can still hear her wild stallion

Heartbeat in the goose bumps of her memory

And in the lap of the ocean waves

As they flicker their tongues

About the sad and tragic day

That the ultimate darkness first became

Her secret boyfriend before it slit her throat

Like a canceled check on which you have stopped your pay

Way up in the pristine hills that tossed and turned

In the disarray of her troubled sleeping

Until my insomnia became an X-acto knife

Because of the secrets that I have long been keeping

On that day that I was first banished

Into a herd of swine and became cliff bound till the end of time.

How Like A Chainsaw’s Scream

My lost childhood was doused with pixie dust

And took place in a diamond mine full of new curiosities

Where finned ladies stirred a cauldron of hallucinations

That had a kind of decay that perched itself on the edge of psychosis

Until it fluttered like a moth into the snow

As it faded into the cliff side of a psychiatric hospital

Where my mysterious demon dogs taught even

The sultan’s daughter the true meaning of fear

In that place where all was mute and Frankenstein’s  Monster like

As it skirted the edges of Vlad The Impaler

And other dreams that got torn apart

As strobe lit weird purple things smothered us in nightmares

That they commanded to turn to dust

And then while I changed myself into something else

Thundering and gloomy by a candlestick’s shaft of light

Then I opened up dusty curtains that cried out in agony

And escaped to where a grainy coachman collapsed inside of his clothes

As I became an evil nobleman of such mournful music

That undertakers removed garlic from their front doors at my very approach

And then while a cute young barmaid fetched me another bottle

My hair turned white overnight as I faced old age and all that it portended

And then with the gurgling of the first rays of the dawn’s early light

Was reduced to what God had long ago intended.

Juxtapositions In Limbo

The dreams that come from nervous breakdowns

Contain bestial prophecies in their trembling scribbling

More acid tasting than a skull faced jukebox’s death lament

And as they chew through their straightjackets

Like aggressive baboons

My flesh turns to hydrochloric acid

In the delirium of my own private sacred grove

As I don the mask of this sick chamber

That is in the most beheaded of all kingdoms

And one which harkens back  to the voices of the dead

So pregnant with divinations as they come at me

Like floating chainsaws out of fog

And then in their hideous auras

As blue and glassy as the rasping sounds

That set off the bareness of my transformation as

I hail Satan and then in a whirl of solid blackness I become a frog

Meow

Crawling into the primal terror of darkness

I remember a dream of horrible smothering

That was burned out and like a sound wavering

Where something seemed to move in the confusion

And the terror that I was unable to clarify

A naked face like some strange gelatinous carcass

On an abandoned ship of great despair

Whose cavernous echoes gushed

And then were rescinded  

And then frozen like a retracting disease

In that maze of dank screeching

Where I awakened to the barren faint meow

That brings on remembrance

Yet now that the macabre teeth are almost upon me

And the horrible reverberating hiss of what was once

The old alley cat that we once christened Princess

When we smuggled her aboard

Little dreaming that our furry reminder

Of our far away home would mate

with something that only it could see or sense

And would bring forth that which has now grown hungry once again

After first gorging itself on all the others

And so comes now undulating and slowly giggling

To feast upon the last one still breathing

And the one whose idea it first was to bring a feline with us

Into places man was never meant to go

In the quest of knowledge well beyond us all

In the quest of things we have no right to know.

 

Waltz of the Luminous Blasphemies

In an old Victorian house that has been long perishing

Scooped out like the insides of a pumpkin now

Something glows in the dark with a lime green glimmer

Like eyelids fluttering behind a mask

And as the glittering spider webbed moon arises

Stirring up all the bones once hidden by autumn leaves

In the jeweled tail feathers of a graveyard

Where things go on that are hard to believe

And it drapes all of October in eerie hues

As ghostly apparitions flit about the petrifying horror

Of the approaching midnight hour

Releasing a bewitchment on the haunted city below

That is too afraid to sleep near its own dark harbor

Where the Flying Dutchman briefly stops

To take on provisions to take on a fresh crew

As I climb its serrated edged staircase

To the starry night swirling flocked

With purple feathered ravens

With furiously beating wings

I realize that since the hour of my birthing

That I was put here to be part and parcel

Of all these strange and oh so wondrous things

Just A Shadow?

Skeletons of leaves dance in the graveyard near the pumpkin patch

The hour I’ve been most anticipating has arrived on raven’s feet at last

In the rock candy large brush strokes of a drooling painting

Created in yon distant pumpkin tower

Where once was conjured up the still much discussed

Hudson River Valley’s premier jack- o- lantern

That has long rested in a hand that no longer knows its head

And is attached to the ghastly rider

Who has a laugh like bedsprings rusty and squeaking

And who needs no vocal chords to do his speaking

As he pronounces that he will haunt your dreams forever

Once it is him you have been meeting

For he is the king of all fear

And once it is his name you hear

You too will agree that he is

The overlord of all misrule and disharmony

As he once was and will forever be

Nightmare without end

Amen.

Twisted Ruminations

Night is a secret world

A rusted hour glass

Whose boneless magic

Grins and trembles

In the olden shifting

Of forever bountiful shadows

Where starlight drips

With the saliva

Of hallucinations

Till the ancient gates

Of my very blood

Tighten down

Into a farewell

Until my name

Is only wanderings

In the ominous flesh

Of a brain that grinds the jade

Of the fearful unknown

And other vast strange things

That seek out my body

Like a blade to see what

Forbidden delicacies it might contain .

Strange Entities

Dusk was like a suitcase covered with old stickers

As I made eye contact with harvested cornfields

Now overgrown with tall weeds

That promised a midnight of gooseflesh

And faint moans vandalized by smoky images

Like the lost keys to an old building

Lingering in the gray zone

By antiquated crossroads

Entangled and interconnected

Into the now deceased night

As a sky full of cobwebs

Created in secret by persons long gone

Seconds later it was vanishing

Like a hush in a chapel that cannot last

Beautifully carved like a foreign coin

That you refuse to turn into cash

Leaving me doubting my oft times

Fanciful senses as I continued my journey

Down roads framed by fences.

Peeled Back Layers of Cloven Hooves

The antiquity of midnight is discernible

Only in the unbelievable

A snake eating its own tail

That echoes in the frazzled disembodied voices

Of demons stacked up like Lego blocks

Lately burst out of the drain of memories

That has been wiped away

Leaving behind only a muddy pallet

Of menace that never falters when it hunts for prey

Mysterious Feasts

Howling and dreamless unknown nightmares

I am hidden by all that goes unnoticed

Submerged in cornfields beneath the too full moon

My mind is trapped in a splintered birdcage

Slowly decaying at the bottom of a swimming pool

Full of shallowly breathing ghosts

And like severed thumbs dissolving

Into champagne bubbles that morph into

Something stranger and fur covered

That simmers as it reaches threat level orange

There is no amnesty in yonder mansion

Where scarlet dreams whimper so rough hewn

While wandering wolves lately crawled from their dens

To frolic in the stillness of my sinister slumber

Where I drink down the emerald prophecies

Of the twilight specters who eerily whisper

With voices like twitching scissors

In the carcasses of dead tree roots where blades of red squirm

In the cantos of our shared secrets

Where my Lenore was never Tell Tale

But was indeed the throb of a dream made flesh

Taken away from me by the Pope of all corpses

Whose golden blurring liquid mocks my willpower

Just one more time and then one time more

As it promises vainly that it can persuade me

To think of Lenore never more.

The Froth of Nightmares

Tremulous and shivering was her kiss

As it anesthetized the slits of my mask

And profound and unfounded

Was all that came next

And since I could not move a muscle

I relaxed and bobbed like the detritus

Of a shattered merchantman ship

In the kelp and the reddening tide

Black, oh black were the feathers of her wings

As she gave me all that I had ever thought

That I truly desired

But when paradise’s gates were denied to me

And I was condemned to eternal fire

I wished that I had tarried and lingered longer

Even though most of all that wasn’t very pleasant

For now that I am royalty in Hell

I wish that I was Heaven’s most humble peasant

After Being Disemboweled He Put Back On His Skin

Boney white panic tears by with strangely leering eyes

While faces drift from the charred pit of a rainspout

That has now become more of a flute

And all of this releases the candy corn

That lurks in every shifting storm cloud

Flickering down every street now with feet like rats

As it blows crunching leaves through the protesting corn shocks  

Then gets lost in the death pale ravine that once entered

Provides no way of ever coming back

And someday it will take me with it

To that place I long to go

And whose only sorrow that it lately holds for me

Is that the whole process is far too slow

Lines Scratched Down In Black Soot

A night raven mixed up the shadows of the edge of the cliff

That Edgar Allan Poe finally threw himself off of

A precipice of grog and rotgut and opium pipes

With deep tooth marks and slobber upon their stems

And yet still through it all her too young death most untimely still pecked to get in

As it crawled in the sweat and gooseflesh of his too tight for comfort skin

And yet the old circus of his gauzy voice still slithers and even undulates as it fades

Leaving behind the dancing couplets which marked him as the best one

Whoever bothered to take up the poet’s trade

Black Revelry

The battered objects of my ire

Have all drowned in the torrents of my rage

Off balance because of all my vast rejections

My satisfaction has become disconcerting

As it whines and whistles most deranged

And I am as dreamless as the fear and apprehension

Of the drenched motel where I am pinned to a pressboard

That I wish I could remember

Protruding from a lake of submerged comic books

Slamming through a printing press

That I was asked not to go near to nor to tease

But of course all this I ignored and did as I pleased

And now inside of a giant fog enshrouded birdcage

That I jerry rigged with the circuitry I found

Inside of her nonhuman face

Where after passing through a blown airlock

That had stopped abruptly in midsentence

All who had once wronged me came to know

The wholesale slaughter of my zero gravity

Alien croaks at a rapid pace

Then I unplugged the TV

That I had wanted to reproduce with

Slashed all to hell by unstoppable summers

On worlds now dead

Ready at last to join the conspiracy of paladins

And while unearthly Scottish pipers

Inducted me thus through their droning music

I donned a mask of puppets and mirrors

And fulfilled all the obligations and took all the privileges

Of why Satan first placed me here. 

Breaking Formation

Inexplicable vessels fill the skies

Above blistered landscapes pale and unprotected

Venom soaked wind and sand

Echo with frail nonhuman thoughts

Like great lakes of oil a ‘flame

And as the day wanes

And turns dark and distant

While this glimmering yawning abyss

Dons its armor

A ragged scar cleaves the sky

As a long maintained nightmare

On a half naked way length arrives

And tells me to awaken

To the things that I never even realized

That I had the potential for

But then I am the first Earthman

To leave his planet

And in the long months

And years away from

That place I now abandoned

I’ve tread on vistas like nothing I’ve ever seen

With each day becoming more of an unmoored dream

And whatever I used to be I no longer am

My bones are disappearing

For I have no further need of them

And my so-called brain

Which was once so organized and rational

Now to the strangest conclusions

Glides most casual

And anyway you slice me

I’m now something totally new

And so to come home seems trivial

And for reasons for which I have no clue

So say farewell to my wife and children

Whom with each day fade

From my list of cares and concerns

For I am now lost amongst the stars

And throb with a desire to stay only there

Blues For Norman

(For “Hitch”)

Body ripping transformations on rickety flights of stairs

Your senses are some heightened animal

Whose color keeps changing while you scream and swear

And since Lucifer is always in the middle of such songs

That echo down the balancing act of the paranoia of streets

Poetic and all torn up where all is silver

And bloody fast in the taxidermied subconscious

Whose motel bathroom like his mommy is all dressed up

As he receives a call from his home planet written in a mirror script

Decipherable to him and him alone

Which flutters like the cannibal birds

That once graced her now tattered gown

And can anything be off the menu

When you serve she who will always be

The queen of the papier-mâché coroner’s office

Where you were born all bloody and obscene

And in the midst of all this unraveling in the oddity shop

That is your life where who you really wish you were married to

Gets preserved in all that gets unleashed upon the damaged vocal cords

Of a sane and normal life and yet there is a certain sense to all this chaos

A kind of art indeed which once splattered across the newscasts

Times twenty-four hours will glorify your deeds

And your superstardom will be achieved

Your place in the history books will be all sewn up

Like the mummified eyelids and sawdust choked mouth

That still converses with you somehow

Even though it lacks a tongue and all of this is secret

Because that’s what’s best to you in life

And in the putrefying ventriloquism of your daily existence

You will find satisfaction for a time

But someday there will be questions that must get answered

When the lake is dredged and drained

And though they’ll treat you kindly

Psycho will then become your only name

For they fear all that you’ve accomplished

And your explanation for it all

‘Cause we all go a little mad sometimes

Just kind of makes their blood to boil

And yet the ultimate truth is much simpler

And even purer when finally grasped 

Because a boy’s best friend is his mother

And I guess we’ll just leave all this at that.

Crow Bait

The fleeting funeral march of an empty dream

Slumbers mournful like leaves that wither

When breathed upon by the angel of death

As the red foam upon all battle lances melting like snow

Till it forms a surf like an autumn sunset are his too

For he easily collects all that to him is due

‘Neath the stars that gambol and play

In the twitching sky like a pack of wolves

Arguing over fresh kill that fought hard not to die

And lest we forget how this tumult humbles the far off dunes

Drunk with the iron shard tongues of ancient sacrifices

That were so willingly made with so little provocation

Giving rise to empires and new nations

That acted as flowers for the graveyards of the moon

As they faded away in a fandango of black feathers

And though inching like a glacier still they cut deep

While moving ever more slowly all their promises to keep .

 

Final orbit

Light-years out omniscient and waiting

Ever waiting 

As boneless and harsh 

As the Martian terrain 

Is something not exactly human 

But that is indeed immortal 

That merged with me 

When I was but a helpless child

And has since then 

Ever called out to me 

Again and again 

Commanding me to come hither 

And for years I resisted 

Until that day 

When all the doorways dissolved 

And I found myself 

In the presence of 

What had beckoned me 

Unaware of what might next be involved 

And as I emerged in its mind screens 

Linked to its pleasure centers

A queasy realization vibrated 

Through my every cell 

That what had called out to me 

Was indeed female 

And had selected me deliberately and well 

And now on that unchartered world 

I merge with her more each day 

Growing more a sulphurous yellow 

With each new tryst 

And prizing more the metamorphosis  

That is my reward 

For her every unearthly kiss .

Jammed Transmissions

In quadrants omnipotent 

Where the peaceful blackness 

Has awakened at last 

In jettisoned star systems 

Where in unknown eons 

Now long fled 

Backwards planets 

Whose unfocused thoughts 

Creaking with antiquity 

In the ancient bones 

Of that frigid void of space 

Here I have lived long 

Orbiting in a distant galaxy all my own 

Through nightlong eons 

Of falter and fail 

A life form now turned to dust 

In a long ago now all gone to rust 

Astride a memory machine steed 

Who reeks with the aroma of decay 

As he gallops through 

This once unbelievable and sentient city 

Leaving no footprints in the lime green rain.

I Have To Keep Her On A Chain

Ken L. Jones

My thoughts are a lavender tinted steeple chase

Where winged horses are tortured routinely

To appease a cat eyed clock

Bloodshed caused by frozen interference

That unleashes the dreadful secrets

That lie buried beneath Jack The Ripper

As I shuffle down this street

That has decaying teeth

Checking always under my bed

Which has a sick love for gutted dogs

And where I dream nightmares and visions

That briefly loan me the gouged out eyes of Poe

All That Remains Unwritten

Ken L. Jones

A flat line gray sea of memorable fever dreams

Forms a dirge most portentous

Where something like freshly mutated

Paper dolls arise from the dead

With a clockwork precision

Shrieking and hacking and slashing

As they turn the Earth to red

And like unexpected deserts receding

While they gleefully spread their reign of sighing dread

That eats away at the bleak autumn night

Releasing souls from Hell

And even more incoherent realms then that

Until the streets flow with the bones and blood

Of deformed elder Gods that no one could love

But who have returned to take back

All that once was theirs

And to make you sorry

That their unnatural slumber

Ever was disturbed

Once While Stumbling Through A Swamp of Dark Genesis

Ken L. Jones

Tumbling in the tattered clothes of shallow thunder clouds

Anesthetized patients bid adieu to their own crushed heads

Peeling off layer after layer of bright red explosions

Flushing like overflowing toilets as they splatter

Into streets that are deserted and drenched from head to toe

With the eternally creepy and the busted baby dolls of their own brain matter

Frozen in an arctic most deliciously evil

With a sleep deprivation that swelters like yellow jackets upon your skin

In a theater box where I saw my own body’s descent into madness

Which carried its own scars within it

And on a graffiti covered bridge that the grim reaper will soon be visiting

Where you have no choice but to become a royal attendant

To heads most roll that is fraught and tense with all that can’t be proven

And where magic and all its connections are merely abandoned cars now

Auditory and visual hallucinations become the plastic dinosaurs

With which my shattered consciousness does play

In a world where TV shows that are out to get you

Are the brightest prospect in the programming day

And as I attempt to set upright on Third Reich furniture

And not slip off because it is drenched in blood

Once more I declare publicly and quite openly

That none of any of this was very much worth it

Except for your own perfect love

Which I will use as my own dim lantern

As I descend to something even worse than all of this

And as I succumb to its sick promise and infinite clatter

I will treasure for all of eternity our final kiss.

On Achieving At Last My True Serpentine Form

Ken L. Jones

Drowning in a surf of choking sobs in a trussed up cove

Where a symphony tremulous and whispering

Melted ominously into the red, red, lips

That snarled from deep within that labyrinth of caves

As it glowed blue with the gibbering offspring of the circus of my reeling brain

Whose mother’s milk seeped from the walls

Of a chamber of horrors ape like and deformed

And in a blurred whiplash quivering

With the welts of all that is truly insane

As it coughed up the blood of a premonition

With the fragrance of unreal footsteps

Whose shuffling malignance was like

A heavy un-oiled door swinging open

Hell born and with the odor of a tomb

As if to remind me that whatever passes for reality was denied me

From before the day I was born and was encoded in me in the womb

Voracious

Ken L. Jones

Naked butcher knife streets

Growling like a dead woman

Where copy cat incidents

Try to gouge out your eyes

Because they presumed

That you are alone

Though several other prisoners

Hide behind the all too knowing

Grin that you do little to disguise

And when they break free

From their restraints

Unraveling and undiagnosed

And what everyone thinks

Is really you disappears

Beneath an eerie blue glow

That caresses a strangely purple sky

Then comes forth a flesh eating monster

Like some fast moving river

Trailed by an army of rats in its wake

And in the stalk and take down that follows

All becomes a dream

That I no longer recognize myself in

Though to every second of it I more than relate

And then as these visions become a hunchback

And over cathedral spires do scamper away

I awake to the clarinets that are sacred to Persephone

Fascinated as always by the mechanics of all of this

So oscillating so pale in color as it all haunts me still

Even after sixty plus years

And the only way I can keep it at bay for a time

Is to trap it in a notebook like I’m now doing here

The Thief of Blood

Ken L. Jones

He arises from the throat of his grave

With no other thought than to kill

And with fetid breath sallies forth

To work his will as he shambles down a hill

Of tombstones tilting as moonlight spills

And makes of the darkness fragments

Of all that the sun once did love

And then this thing that was born a man

But who lately casts no shadow arises on moonbeams

As if he were being pulled aloft on puppet strings

As the echoing wolves of the countryside loudly salute him

For he indeed is their true king

But is he really as regal as he thinks

And as majestic and untouchable

As he’d like you to believe

If so let us please consider

All that slows him down or causes him grief

Or which can still the unnatural beating of his heart

The whirling odor of garlic keeps him at bay

Any coming dawn can turn him to powder and bones

Drops of holy water are like acid to his flesh

The merest shadow of a cross causes him to cringe and hiss

And if his coffin he cannot reach

Where upon his native soil he must sleep away

The work a day world’s normal parameters untouched and undiscovered

Until he is compelled to resurrect with a thirst unlike any other

Then flits and sneaks on wings no man was ever born with

As he looks for feeding grounds where no proper precautions have been taken

To keep such as he from siphoning and from draining

All that keeps ups ambulatory until none is remaining

And while some would call him the epitome of all dread

He’s nothing but an empty mirror

A cowardly creeper hugging shadows

Simply too stupid to realize he is dead

And that to any person of strong will and true belief

He is an obstacle that can be overcome

He is no aristocrat or seducing lover or warrior chief

To me he is nothing but a thief

A craven thief of blood

The Froth of Nightmares

Ken L. Jones

Tremulous and shivering was her kiss

As it anesthetized the slits of my mask

And profound and unfounded

Was all that came next

And since I could not move a muscle

I relaxed and bobbed like the detritus

Of a shattered merchantman ship

In the kelp and the reddening tide

Black, oh black were the feathers of her wings

As she gave me all that I had ever thought

That I truly desired

But when paradise’s gates were denied to me

And I was condemned to eternal fire

I wished that I had tarried and lingered longer

Even though most of all that wasn’t very pleasant

For now that I am royalty in Hell

I wish that I was Heaven’s most humble peasant

Below The Freezing Mark

Ken L. Jones

The case book of nowhere left to run

Is now on all the TV channels

Wearing nothing but a top hat

And where else to go in all this bleeding

Now that everything is being born dead

And as I began to hallucinate

As I fear to fall asleep

Until I awake hemorrhaging

Trying to stay conscious for awhile

In a tunnel of delirium

That has had its womb cut out

It’s all too dark and nothing has any toe holes

Not even the scavenged copper pipes

Of the Nagasaki goodbye

Of the pestilence that lurks in all the canned goods

And no extraterrestrials are enroute

And the clowns are all in a tizzy

And I have been delivered

To the rat hole of my most deserved punishment

Where I am casually devoured by giant ants

In an imaginary kingdom lately come apart at the

Such Emotions As Get Left Behind

Ken L. Jones

Boney guitar notes heard as they creep and crawl up the dappled hills

The papier-mâché river’s black hair is made of full moon shadows

Above the lace work of towns below like blown out candles nibbled upon

Like a skeleton’s head upon which for too long rats have fed

And fireflies are the only remembers now as they dart up there

Amongst the dissolving tombstones from a long time gone

And one in which much more was allowed in those jack-in-the-box séances

Of forever vanished days in an ancient midnight

Now as dead as some crystal ball long shattered

A Visitation By What Visitor?

Ken L. Jones

Pipe smoke when there’s no one there

An old dark suit held together now only by spider webs

Dust raised by the gesturing of something very much like hands

Dreadful and trembling as it jibbers and wobbles

On the appalling broken bamboo of its legs

As it sets off dogs a’barking while trailing a rotten meat stench

But is it the bloody silence of everything else that frightens me the most

As it drowns me and makes me a ghost

Doomed by my own Hell bent jaws that couldn’t blaspheme fast enough

While my nostrils snorted to signify their lust

As addicts that unfurled with a moldering beckoning

In the black silk twilight where a bone yard stairway

As dreadful as a torn off mask strutted

Like cave paintings sprung to horrible life

Because I was too naïve to run and so was lost forever to me

A thing that I never believed in until I forfeited my own immortal soul for all time

A Dream Out Loud

Ken L. Jones

Dancing dust specks

Of distant guard dogs growled

Fog of night streets like a muddy coffin

Rosettes of alleyways

Where all that has happened

Craves out its own singularly horrible space and time

While the sky broken open like a piñata struck

Shrieked with tongues of rust

In abandoned catacombs of no particular light

Where I passed a hellish night

While my dead mother’s voice

Jumped out of my skin

Then pulled me back into its depths again

While mummified birds

That swooped to attack

Whispered their grimacing laments

Like ten pins being knocked about

In hills where Hendrick Hudson and his crew

Still occasionally cast a long sleep

Upon you with their oh bewitching brew

A Brief Memorandum To My Chilly Associates

Ken L. Jones

All the lines are blurring into macabre silhouettes

That leave bruises upon all my darkest places

As everyone of my conversations

These days end up on autopsy tables

Where they are turned into terrifying extraterrestrial lampshades

Whose tentacled fingers touch you and probe you at the same time

Dream murmurs remembered in the faded bronze stillness

And somber transmissions that creep across the landscape

Wearing battered top hats like frozen corpses now horrible reanimated

As I feast on staircases in a slaughter house

That is almost half naked as I try to focus its blurry image inside of my mind

Here the remains of a human being

Are looked upon as misplaced birthday presents

In the free floating fear that gurgles like a

Legless tea kettle left too long on the stove

While all the while waiting and crouching in anticipation

The hour it will be skinned alive

And then at last will know true repose

 

After Being Disemboweled He Put Back On His Skin

Ken L. Jones

Boney white panic tears by with strangely leering eyes

While faces drift from the charred pit of a rainspout

That has now become more of a flute

And all of this releases the candy corn

That lurks in every shifting storm cloud

Flickering down every street now with feet like rats

As it blows crunching leaves through the protesting corn shocks  

Then gets lost in the death pale ravine that once entered

Provides no way of ever coming back

And someday it will take me with it

To that place I long to go

And whose only sorrow that it lately holds for me

Is that the whole process is far too slow

Lines Scratched Down In Black Soot

Ken L. Jones

A night raven mixed up the shadows of the edge of the cliff

That Edgar Allan Poe finally threw himself off of

A precipice of grog and rotgut and opium pipes

With deep tooth marks and slobber upon their stems

And yet still through it all her too young death most untimely still pecked to get in

As it crawled in the sweat and gooseflesh of his too tight for comfort skin

And yet the old circus of his gauzy voice still slithers and even undulates as it fades

Leaving behind the dancing couplets which marked him as the best one

Whoever bothered to take up the poet’s trade

Something in The Snow

Ken L. Jones

 

While coming back by myself from a performance of the Nutcracker ballet

In a part of the country in which my relatives live

And which I never visited before that day

And before which I did a little Christmas shopping

I took a short cut past a forest of pines

With snow on all their toppings

And I stopped briefly by the woods

Like I was Robert Frost to watch the moon rise up in all its full ness

Little realizing the cost of such idle indulgence on my part

For as I became lost in visions and reveries and things from long ago

Remembered overwhelmed me

Something was creeping in the crunching slush

And pinecones downed

Something that avoids all towns

Something dreadful and hard for reason to define

Especially so at Christmas time

And as I listened to the Ray Coniff singers on my car’s CD sing What Child Is This

Which transported me back to the nineteen sixties and the last century

Something was slavering as it drew closer to me

But I would be the last to know as I tripped out on my first kiss beneath mistletoe

That I received from a Swedish American goddess in our church’s basement

At a square dance there

And so I never saw coming that flash of claws and hair

As something tore through my windshield glass
And drew me out through its jagged mass

Then pounced on me as if someone had just sounded the dinner gong

And it was something that had been starving for far too long

And then I realized to late where I was and in what state

The place where the Donner Party long ago

While in a covered wagon train heading west

Had started out far too late

Had succumbed to a long drawn out and awful fate

As snowboundness turned the strange place they had stopped into a Hell both rare and true

When they ran out of normal things upon which to chew

And the meat of their dead friends and even the marrow in their whitening bones

Took on a savor they could not disown

And it is said that all of this hideous gourmetry

Left behind something in the very ground and trees

And that it even impregnated the very air

With the stench and vileness of all that once occurred there

And that this angry madness and this grief

Still even permeates the rocks and the falling leaves

With a hunger that still sometimes manifests

And though most locals now avoid such a place as this

Such a tourist was I that I was about to come dinner

On its rough hewn plate

A Christmas feast for this mindless force

That the sickest of all necessities long ago had set upon its course

And now it was going to eat me raw

And eat me slow and would leave behind

Little by which the authorities would ever know

Exactly what had transpired here

And they’ll list me as missing

I won’t be the first for none can face the real truth

Of what here still lurks

And reenacts upon the unwary

The fact that starvation can make the menu greatly vary

Even at this most peaceful season of the year

And so one last thought as consciousness leaves me

Next Christmas if you receive an invitation

For out of town visiting maybe in your own backyard you should be staying

For sometimes even all of the beauty of t his best of all holidays

Cannot repel or keep away the walking memory of the worst of long past days

That longs to share its misery as its sole gift on a Christmas Eve of deep regrets.

 

Face to Face

Ken L. Jones

Once long ago when I was a child on Christmas Eve

I ventured down our stairs because of a commotion I heard down there

And was surprised to see Santa Claus

And he was equally startled by me

And he stopped at his labors beneath our tree

And invited me to climb up on his knee

Then more than suspecting that he was my Dad

I gave his full beard a very hard snatch

And was surprised when his whole face came peeling right off

And that what lay beneath it would make an ambulance attendant barf

Why even the Phantom of the Opera looked better than he

For you see his face by fireplace diving had been quite fricasseed

Then he threw me down on the ground

And disappeared up the chimney taking the presents

With him that he was going to give me

And from that long day unto this he has never been back

And I never again received anything wonderful from his big sack

Now I don’t know if curiosity ever killed any cats

But I’ve always regretted that impulsive act

And recommend if you ever find yourself in my place

Take at face value Santa’s face

For if you don’t you might not like what you find

And it will wreck all you Christmases for all time

 

Once

Ken L. Jones

One morning on what seemed the best one yet

Beneath our tree was left a mysterious gift

Somehow though no one knows how it first got there

A Victorian dollhouse somehow did appear

And my young daughter loved it so

How she squealed did Santa ever know

And though my wife, our other children, and I were puzzled by that

We had other things upon our minds and presents to unwrap

And then the day danced by till it was time for the children to take their naps

And Ma and I by that time needed one too

So soon we all lay down for a long winter’s snooze

When out of nowhere came a storm

That only in the pits of Hell could have ever been born

The kind that takes a home to Oz

And leaves behind shattered house foundations

And debris strewn lawns

And somehow something awoke us just in time to escape with just our very lives

And whatever little we could grab

As this act of God closed upon us fast

 And then it did what it wanted

With such mercilessness

That it made me wonder how we had ever sinned

To have such a judgment as this placed upon me and my kin

And then after it had all faded away and we took a survey

To see what price it would cost us to pay

Then our hearts sank within our chests

As we saw the awful mess

Of all that we had once loved and owned

Now merely slivers and fragments of things unknown

And then I took a tally of what we still clutched

And realized that it wasn’t very much

But then I saw that my youngest daughter

Her new dollhouse had saved

And she was hugging it like it was a newborn babe

And then she did something I still doubt till this day

As she placed it in the dust where only yesterday

Our family house had so long stood

A loving abode of brick and wood

And then she bent low and kissed its chimney top

And watered the thing with tears that came nonstop

As she sobbed a murmured prayer

And then the little house quivered as it sat there

Then shook and expanded at a galloping rate

Till it was full size and looming large

And was now a place of dwelling for men instead of dolls

And the very notion of this all

Caused us to broadly smile

Now this was astonishing but we quickly learned to take it in our strides

As we ventured timidly deep inside

And saw that it was fully stocked

And with all that we would need it was packed

And so it stayed in our family there

From that long ago day to this

Now that young daughter of mine

Who wished into existence all of this

Now has children of her own

Who have moved out because their grown

And I am soon bound for an old folk’s home

But down through all these vanishing days

None of us could ever explain who brought the dollhouse

That could do something so magical

And I’m guessing we will never exactly know

Or how someone knew we’d need it soon

Perhaps there really is something do you think

To the whole idea of St. Nick

But beyond that thought is anybody’s guess

About what happened long ago on that Christmas Day of such distress

And how a tiny edifice meant for china dolls

Could become the salvation of my family one and all

 A Christmas Remembrance For A Town Now As Cold As Bones

Ken L. Jones

In old New Orleans it wasn’t Frosty who wore a top hat

But Baron Samedi  King of the Dead

As down there while carols were played by a jazz brass band

Voodoo drums kept time that pounded as they tingled in your head

And every Mama Loa and Houngan Man selling the one and only original mojo bag

That contained a John De Conquer root

Were more popular at Christmas time than peppermint sticks

Or chocolate gelt or a Christmas stocking’s slide whistle penny flute

Now the man for whom Christmas is all about its true raised the dead

And was even himself on the third day arisen

After his brutal crucifixion but even all of that in numbers pales

When compared to the zombies released from their dirt jails

To join in on the Christmas celebration

Now all of this went on for centuries in one of America’s oldest cities

Till one day the levees broke hard and what followed wasn’t pretty

Now all of this was scattered to the four winds

And all that about in December Satchmo and the Neville Brothers and Harry Connick, Jr

Once did sing was washed away

Until the Queen city became but a shadow of its former self

Which is now well past its day

Because what once made it such a fright fiend’s delight

Even on a Christmas night is now happening secretly and quietly in some other town

Now that not much of the Delta Queen of the Mississippi is hardly left around

But once upon a time it was a far different place

And Christmas wore a skull’s painted on face

As withering African maidens welcomed the yuletide in

Much like they invited the disembodied to take a ride inside of their skin

And I miss it yes I do

Farewell old New Orleans

And Merry Christmas to you and your long vanished voodoo.

Past and Repast

(For Richard Matheson and Rod Sterling whose birth on Christmas Day was a present to us all)

Ken L. Jones

Once in a December season when I was but an old cartoonist

I attended a comic book signing session in my honor

At a specialty shop in my hometown

And when it was done and finished

Then back to my place I was eventually bound

Walking on foot to enjoy the decorations and the scenery

Past bare trees all covered in hoar frost
Past homes and locations that I’d long known

Lost and awash in sentimentality remembering

Much of my six plus decades of rolling and tumbling

While Christmases past went marching through my memories

Like wooden soldiers from Babes In Toyland a’strutting

Then somehow as if a ghost right out of Dickens came a fog unseen unbidden

That left me no other exit but to walk straight through it

And so though it was somehow forbidding

I kept on plodding if only because I was hoping to soon be home again

But I found instead a moist morass that had the gravity of cotton candy as its mass

And as it touched me everywhere I felt a tingling from my feet to my now white hair

And then when some untimely timelessness had passed

And I found my way out of it somehow at last

And saw that much of what I had expected to see somehow appeared altered to me

Was this some parallel dimension such as I had often encountered

In my dealings with popular culture

No somehow that didn’t seem to fit what I was experiencing

No this instead on further study was exactly the places upon which I had just been dwelling

My hometown in the olden days of my youth so golden

When all was better and with promise swelling

And yet as impossible as it might seem

It wasn’t a hoax or imaginary story or a dream

But the streets I had trod when still a lad

And better than that like in my own time Christmas vibrated everywhere

And its spirit did entwine all within its red and green grasp

And the perfection of it all made me gasp

And then before I could be too swallowed up in my elation

I beheld a phantasm coming towards me

And knew immediately what I was seeing

Coming at me on a Schwinn Phantom a’pedaling

Was none other than me

At eight years old tearing through the wind so cold

Enroute I surely knew to where

And so I followed until by and by I came to be there

Twas a grocery store called The Shopping Bag

Now long changed into several other hands currently a La Carnicerneta

That serves the undocumented workers all that they do enjoy eating

And yet back then it was in full vigor and was still serving its original masters

And there was I inside by a comic book spinner rack studying its contents doing the math

That would with my generous allowance allow me to buy a stack of comic books

That would like Aladdin’s flying carpet allow my imagination to fly

And when this transaction was done and passed and I chanced to face myself at last

And tried not to startle him as he walked past

And so I thought to catch his attention by uttering something that I hesitate to mention

A minor act of vandalism he had recently successfully completed

And one for which he would never be caught

And which to another living person about it he would never tell

And then perhaps thinking me some lawman

He agreed to sit on a nearby bus bench

And listen to all that I had to say

Then feeling quite emboldened I revealed to him who I really was

Thought it really shook his mind an examination of my wallet’s contents by him

Calmed him down enough to believe his eyes

My driver’s license helped a lot

But an old dog eared photo of me with my mom, my sister and my pop

Convinced him sure that his future self was by him sitting there

Then he said I’ve seen stories like this a time or two in comic books 

And on Mr. Sterling’s TV show do you have something dire of which to warn me

A path to avoid that is waiting for me

And thinking hard on all this I told him no

But then I took the opportunity to explain his future goals

That a cartoonist he would someday be

And that he should never give up if he fails at it the first few times or three

And that someday when comic books cost dollars instead of a dime

That he would be known for such talents far and wide

And while this pleased him he still wondered why

Through time I had traveled and with him now did abide

Didn’t I have surely some great truth that I could relate

Which he could remember and cling to at future dates 

And then after I thought awhile I looked into the eyes of myself as a child

And said Christmas I whispered and he replied by asking me what I meant

And I said never miss one nor not enjoy it to the fullest

Or you will regret the loss of the most precious of seasons you can bet

And even when the rest of the year your patience has fried take refuge in it

Like the safest harbor a boat can make or get

For at its core is the truest truth and it will always comfort you

And will multiply what you put into it like fishes and loaves

And the new wine that it offers will warm your soul

And always remember to give as well as receive

And to honor December and all its gravid promise

Which is more than worth the trouble each year to harvest I do believe

And I could tell by the look upon his face that he understood me perfectly

And would heed all that I had to say

And then I added one more time

Never again break someone else’s window glass

And promise me that on the law’s side you from now on will always be at last

And then he nodded and wiped tears away

And said he’d be good till his dying day

And I just chuckled to myself but didn’t correct him

Because I already knew that after this such bad actions would neglect him

And then something even stranger than all of this enveloped me

As I felt myself unraveling and as I started to dissolve and fade away

I wished him a Merry Christmas and he wished me the same

And then my consciousness I lost for how long is hard to say

Until a torrential rain awoke me startled on that day

And I could tell by how shopworn everything around me seemed

That I was back in my proper century

And then I raised my weary bones and trudged off longing to get home

Glad that I had landed once again in the midst of Christmas

Vowing to savor it not to miss it

And as I left I sang a carol quite out loud and didn’t care who heard

And then sang several more the entire length of my trip away from there

So footsore to where my family waited

Anxious to get all this down on paper

Before a single detail I might omit

Glad I’d been able to give myself a gift

Even if through time I had to trip

And my own advice to me as a child might apply to you as well

Now if you’ll excuse me I still have much to do

And one more thing Merry Christmas to you

A Chilling Chanty

Ken L. Jones

A while back during a horrible storm way off the Eastern coast a family yacht went down

And though all on board made good their escape and none of them did drown

Still the children who were there were sad as they could be

For Christmas time was only hours away and now they no longer

Had presents and they had lost their tree

And  it was doubtful their father said because of the fog

And their being so far off course if land might even get sighted before the yuletide

From all other days did seek its yearly divorce

And then as if from nowhere an island appeared

One that to the father was most unexpected

And there wasn’t much upon it but the family was glad to note

That there a lighthouse had been erected

And so they made their way across the small island

To its only edifice but were dismayed that all was in ruins

Unmanned and indeed was long neglected

Still anything was better than being out in the elements

And they were soaked right to the skin

And so they carefully worked their way inside

Past cobwebs debris and dust, dust, dust

That met them at every inch

And as father struck a glow stick

And by its eerie dancing and green light

They beheld what waited for them

As refugees from the stormy night

Then candles were found that were still functional

And they were lit and a survey taken

Of what might still be there that might keep body and soul alive

And then came sighs of disappointment from all concerned but Dad

For there was no food nor fresh water nor anything much like that to be had

Still there were beds enough for all concerned

Covered by quilts and feather downs

And so out of their wet clothes which they then hung up to dry

Then off to bed they were bound

And yet the children cried themselves to sleep

And not so strange was that

For Christmas morn’s once expected glories were only hours away

And now there would be none of that

Still there was something nice about being alive

Especially after Mom reminded she of them

Of the inconvenience and privation into

Once had been born the Savior of all men

And if that was good enough for him

Then who were they to expect better

On the day that celebrated his nativity

And so as the candles dripped then died

Then stillness and only shadows reigned

Some creeping force began moving about

And since it was neither sinister nor strange

The exhausted refugees ignored it and succumbed to a deep and peaceful sleep

Then hours passed and the dawn arrived and with it the smells of a feast

So hungry was the family that they all did quickly arise

And let out gasps even Mom and Dad at what awaited their startled eyes

For in the night some benevolence had done great work to make sure

That Christmas did truly arrive

A tree was waiting there all trimmed to a T with decorations from the last century

And beneath it presents of every kind

Several for each kid and a full course dinner set

And waiting there of which they soon partook

Now after these hungry ones ate their fill and drank some Christmas punch

Packages were unwrapped and stockings emptied out

Then bulging tummies were gently rubbed

Now the holiday loot it was varied but two of them stood right out

A teddy bear for the little girl and a nutcracker

That was gifted to the son who was a fidgety sprout

And somehow all of this was still new though surely of an earlier time

And in fact the whole celebration was

Even though how that could exactly be was extremely hard to define

And then just about then some unrecognized voices echoed just outside

Which soon were revealed upon inspection to be the Coast Guard’s search and rescue pride

And they were friendly but puzzled too at what they beheld with their eyes 

And then the oldest one who was their leader cleared his throat and said

If it goes no further than between us all I might have an explanation

Once years ago when I was a boy my father had the job     

To bring supplies out to this lonely place and I often tagged along

Now the lighthouse man back when this place was still up was quite a man

A curmudgeon whose name was Jason Ruff

Now old Jason was a tough old bird but one soft spot had his heart

At Christmas time anything to do with it he always played the largest part

So I guess his ghost much like Marley’s did figures in your own personal Christmas Carol friends

And it seems that Jason instead of Santa Claus made sure

That all the proper December 25 necessities were provided in the end

And even more unexpected than that is the fact of what first apprised us of your plight

For you see this old place’s beacon shone bright throughout the long and stormy night

What‘s so unusual about that father said scratching in question his head

Just that the beacon up yonder is long broken and should have never have worked again

So father and the old man checked that fact round about

And found the top in ruins with the light source long doused out

Now the family were all taken home and kept their presents the rest of their days

And as all concerned vacated the island one more miracle held its sway

For as they left all agreed a hand accordion was squeezed

And croaked out dissent God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen on the breeze

And all of them knew without even discussing it that it was Jason Ruff

Saying a fond farewell to them

And wishing them peace on earth and goodwill to all men

 

Once upon A Time In A Den Of Infamous Resort

(In fond memory of my childhood friend Rudy Ray Moore who gave me the tools to tell such a story with correctly)

Ken L. Jones

There once was a fat man named Eddie

Who rarely had a job and was personally unsteady

He had children all over the place

And none of them in wedlock

Which he considered a disgrace

Now baby mamas he had a score

Including the current one that he hardly adored

All he did was get drunk and high all day

In his girlfriend’s rental garage

From noon to long after midnight held its sway

While chain smoking cigarettes and picking fights with his neighbors

Who hated him and his clan and the endless parties that they favored

Now there was an Eddie Jr. who was like a clone of him

And he was also a real bad sort

Even though he was not yet ten

Now the only normal thing about him

Was that Christmas was soon coming

And he hoped to receive some toys

If on Santa’s nice list he was in the running

So to his so-called Dad he made this request

And the first few times Eddie replied with his ham sized fists

And then the hatchet faced chick with whom him he was shacked

Told him to find their child some toys for Christmas instead of giving him a smack

And since she not Eddie was the man of the house

He staggered downtown to see what wasn’t nailed down or might be lying about

Then near his home away from home a sleazy bar

He noticed for the first time a toy collection center for poor girls and boys

In the shape of a large fiberglass bell jar

And what he could see in there struck Eddie

As a potential Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ style cave full of the kinds of treasures

That his fat son for Christmas so did crave

And so after midnight he went a’ shopping

As back with his old pickup truck he came a’ hopping

And with a panty hose mask upon his face

And mud smeared all over his license plates

He soon arrived to do with a crowbar and a hammer

What the North Pole refused if only to shut up

His illegitimate kid and his common law flooze’s yammer

Now the repository in question was fairly well secured

And it took some work and sweat to get it to give up what it held in there

But of such dishonest efforts Eddie had more than an abundance

And soon its contents were spilling forth

And then were pilled real high in the back of his beat up Ford

Than Eddie jumped in and yelled all aboard

Then quicker than a snowflake is made to fly

Eddie made good with his Christmas presents he didn’t have to buy

And then back to the rented shack he made good his escape

Secure in the knowledge that he had provided well for his son’s upcoming Christmas Day

But then the next morning when he had slightly sobered up

And was checking out his boost

He decided it was too good for the boy who was his junior

And thought of all that he might do for himself if he fenced all that he had light fingered

Then still pajama clad little Eddie happened to wander out of the house

And a smile crossed his face when he saw all of these donated wonders

That his father had so crudely plundered

And the boy danced around and bounced with glee

And squealed look what Santa had come and left early for me

Then Eddie told the unfortunate lad to hit the bricks

That none of this was his to be had

And that indeed it was all for some other kids

And Eddie Jr. broke down and sobbed and wailed

And said Daddy you stole all of this I’m gonna tell on you

Then you’ll go back to jail

And this indeed was the straw that broke the camel’s back

And Eddie on his own son with his doubled up first reared way back

And drove him head first into the garage’s thick wall

Where his skull split opened and his brains came a’ tumbling out one and all

And then with a gurgle the kid’s lights went out

And Eddie hardly cared for never again would he have to pay

To stuff his son’s hungry mouth not even one more day

And though what happened next sounds like some crack head’s bum trip

I swear to god that it actually occurred to Eddie

And was no figment courtesy of a bong

Or a bottle of generic tequila that he sucked on for too long

As Eddie began to shrink down to about the size of a rat

Then something happened that was even stranger than that

As all the toys sprang suddenly to life

And that  they were out to get revenge no one can deny

Now such items of great joy they are usually such fun

But when they want to avenge a fallen child look out everyone

And they did it slow and they took their time

For now fat Eddie was on their dime

Now that the action figures and wooden soldiers and plastic dinosaurs

Were capable of such mayhem there should be no surprise

But it was the other more benevolent seeming toys who gave to their appearance a lie

For they seemed to contain behind their painted smiles all the fury of Hell

Which they rained down on this human disgrace this killer of a child

And Eddie took it like a woman and was soon down on his knees

Begging for his miserable life as he sobbed and wheezed

And then one of their number who was a fairy queen

Flew forward to him and waved her wand in the breeze

And muttered a spell most grim

Then Eddie screamed in agony as his consciousness grew most dim

And then when he awoke in the dark eons later it seemed

Hearing a ratcheting cranking and music that sounded as if it was being squeezed

Out of some kind of a mechanical device that slowly was a’ plinking

Then up through the air he felt himself fly almost without thinking

Or at least his upper torso which was now on a spring drive

And old Eddie wanted to scream but no longer did his vocal chords thrive

As he realized that he was now a jack in the box and part of a child’s hoard of such objects

With which they continually and most roughly play

And that he would be one to his longest undying day

For all kinds of different hells exist you see

And this is the justest one of all for evil old Eddie

For he who once was the most jobless sinner

Whoever crawled the face of the Earth

Was at last in his rightful place as a child’s source of great mirth.

Christmas Eve Takes Its Course

Ken L. Jones

Oh I’m a lucky man and I have an incredibly beautiful wife

Which is strange because I’m quite plump

And to say that I’m not handsome would be quite polite

Now my wife she doesn’t care a thing about my weight

In fact she goes out of her way to see that I’m well fed

With fattening foods upon my plate

And the snacks that she provides me are much too good on which to take a pass

And so I’ve gained hundred pounds since I first married her just a few months back

I no longer work a job but she is quite alright with that

Her salary gets us comfortably quite along

And the only thing that she wants in return

Is that I go with her to her parent’s house on Christmas Eve

And on that point she is quite firm

And since I’d never met them yet I tell you and you can believe

That’s why I’m here now with my in-laws and their friends upon this Christmas Eve 

And they  are the most peculiar looking and acting lot this side of the Addams Family

And they keep eyeing me as they whisper quite conspiratorially

But I keep trying to ignore all them by staring at their gaudy tree

Or else by watching It’s a Wonderful Life upon their TV screen

Anything is better than interacting much with them

And of all this I hope my wife she doesn’t mind

Anyway they’ve handed me lots of hors d'oeuvres and juicy candy treats

And I guess so far I’ve went through three brandy snifters and a bottle of potent Christmas wine

And when I ask what’s for dinner they all smile such knowing smiles

And my mother-in-law says come on out and I’ll show you and then we’ll chat for a short while

Then I stumble out oblivious and do not see it coming

 My wife with a slaughter house mallet who gives my head a drubbing

Then as I awake concussed and seeing double all the time

I realize by the way that I’m now trussed up that upon we they will dine

That I will be the main course at their Christmas banquet and realize way too late

Why such a pretty woman as my wife was even willing to give me our first date

 

The Perfect Tree

Ken L. Jones

Once there was a boy who loved Christmas time

What he liked best of all about it was the live Christmas tree pine

That he picked out and purchased

Then in his little red wagon did take home

From the tree lot next to the grocery store in his own local home town

Now this year when he went down there

What met his eyes caused him to tearfully stare

For both the lot and the old grocery store where now long gone

And replaced by a big box chain affair so huge and so long

And then as he turned and started to leave

Someone tapped him on the shoulder and it was some weird looking sleaze

And it turned out to be a stranger shadowy and much older than he

Now the boy should have ran but for some reason didn’t

As the eerie man asked him where Santa would now be placing his presents

And as the boy began in earnest to cry

The sinister man told him now dry your eyes

For I know of a lot full of live trees not far from here

I’ll give you the directions and I’ll meet you down there

And then he did so and then into the shadows soon disappeared

Now something about this should have made the young man run away

Or cry out for help as in that very place he should have stayed

But his desire to have a live tree instead of the artificial kind

Made him throw all caution to the wind

As past the wrong side of the tracks he traveled so swiftly it made his head spin

Then he beheld a large Christmas tree lot

Where every one of them was made out of wood

And then as if from nowhere the stranger once again by his side stood

And said here’s the place I was talking about

The best and tallest trees here are way in the back

Why don’t you go and I’ll cover the cost after you pick one out

And though something about all this still seemed too good to be true

The trees looked too inviting for him to take a pass like he normally would do

And so as he worked his way into its depths

With a little too much trepidation

Something happened that would have normally caused a great elation

For as if from out of nowhere fell from the sky

A flurry of snow that caused the boy to ask why

This was happening in Orange Country, California

On a day that had been predicted as being eighty degrees

Why the weatherman never even gave a hint that things might freeze

And yet this white Christmas miracle inspired no songs

And instead was full of sad sighs and deep mournful howls

And something that sounded like children bawling

Coming from every direction at once as his name they were all a’calling

And it startled the boy and caused him into one of the trees to bump

And when the pine let out a growling string of curse words the boy almost jumped

For he recognized the voice as belonging to a neighborhood friend

Who had been missing since last Christmas time and he thought he would never see again

And then squinting closer he saw that familiar face

That once with him around the neighborhood sidewalks on razor scooters did race

And yet somehow his friend was far from the same

And then in an instant he knew exactly who was to blame

For whatever it was it was now more pine tree than it was a young man who once had a name

And as the boy turned and wished he could scurry

He found that he could not for his feet had grown tap roots

That rooted him to the spot and had done so in a hurry

And as he looked at his hands he let out a shriek

For they were now green and full of pine needles from which sap did leak

And so he realized as his heart did break

That he had truly and genuinely made a terrible mistake

For somehow he was now becoming what he loved best in the world

And would be for all time a tall and majestic yuletide pine  

Advent of Fear

Ken L. Jones

It was just after Halloween that a yard sale was found

By a collector of Christmas decorations in an obscure part of town

And there amongst the usual garbage and over priced bric-a-brac

Next to a spice tray and a small luggage rack

Was an advent calendar three-dimensional and looking quite old

And though cobwebbed and dusty it was pure collector’s gold

Now the browsing buyer tried to keep a poker face

As he asked the price of it from the owner of the place

And when the word free was uttered in reply

The collector should have known something was wrong with this spectacular of a prize

But too greedy for such objects indeed was he

So he snatched it thanked the man and to his car did flee

And then two hours later was home all alone

Examining the new acquisition to his collection which was his now to own

Now just in case you don’t understand what an advent calendar is let’s take a pause

It’s a way of measuring the December days it takes for Santa Claus

To arrive in town with his toy stuffed sleigh

And it is a grand way to measure each century’s long day

For when each new date’s door is opened a surprise you will find

Usually candy or a small toy or something of that kind

And so you can see why the collector longed to display such an item

Because with such special stuff you should never try to hide them

And so long after Thanksgiving had been and arrived

As he turned over his house to Christmas time

The advent calendar was given a place of honor indeed

Newly refurbished, gleamingly polished and he was really pleased

Then that very midnight on the last of November something happened that was oh so sinister

As this object of wonder took on a look as if it had been cursed

And belonged on the cover of some scary book of verse

The doors of each day were now sprung and at half-mast

And even much worse its cobwebs had returned with spiders a’crawling

And every inch of it was covered in dust so thick it was almost appalling

Now when the collector awoke the next morning and wanted to begin the day

With a piece of peppermint candy that he had hidden away

Behind the door that marked December’s start

He found instead a parchment yellowed

And covered with ink that throbbed like a human heart

And then he found printed therein in

What looked liked splattered blood on tanned human skin

The following poems that only a lunatic could ever truly comprehend

And I know of what I speak for don’t you see

The man who owns this abomination is indeed me

And so each day now until the twenty-fifth

I will share with you my advent calendar’s horrible gifts

A poem each day that while about Christmas time

Might remind you more of a few weeks earlier

When trick or treating was still on our minds

Now dear reader enter freely and of your own will

And drink deeply of my calendar’s unearthly chills

And may they warm you like Yule logs used to burn a witch

As like a man made monster each line is stitched

To let out the werewolf that within us all howls

Even at that time of year when we deck the halls.

Close Encounters of A Christmas Kind

Ken L. Jones

On Christmas evening while hurrying for last minute gifts

I jogged down to The Emporium through a large vacant lot

Then while I was doing this I couldn’t believe my eyes

Because there appeared above me something metallic

And unknown in the evening skies

I tried to run away but found my feet rooted to the spot

And then a purple beam came out from its iris door and caught me quite up in it

Then before I knew it like Superman I could fly

And then before I could clear my head my captors I espied

Now they were gray and lanky and had giant balding heads

Their fingers were like tentacles and that raised goose bumps on my flesh

And not a trace of emotion did I see in their pupil less eyes

As I protested my captivity and then one of them telepathed why into my mind

And I tried to explain to them about Christmas time

And about its celebrated birth and then they said yes we know he was one of us

And we sent him to the Earth and in fact this very ship you see

Was the star The Wise Men knew

And we don’t like what you did to him when you killed him on a cross

Because some said he was the King Of The Jews  

Now it’s true that we revived him and took him back from whence he came

Then he taught us of this Christmas which we still celebrate to this day

In fact that’s why we took you because earthman don’t you see

My daughter wanted a man for a pet for Christmas

One a of good pedigree

And so now on a planet close to the Alpha Centuri star I think

I’m a faithful homo sapien named Bowser

And all day long I perform stupid human tricks

For just some food and drink and I do it by the hour

And it’s all quite humiliating and I often wonder if any of this

Would have happened if I didn’t wait till the last minute to shop for Christmas gifts.

Carol of The Dead

Ken L. Jones

Once while walking to a Christmas Eve party

In a part of town I’d never yet chanced to be in

I happened past a vast expanse of real estate

That was the final resting place of children, women and men

A graveyard so ancient in this long lived town

That I suspected for centuries that some of its denizens had slumbered underground

And yet in shafts of moonlight frosted I swear that I saw

Someone who though without a clearly definable face

Resembled Santa Claus

And he was tapping on each tombstone

And each crypt as if to awaken the very dead

Then in swirls and vapors there appeared

Such shades all dressed in the vintages and fashions of long bygone days

And then in short order appeared to my wondering eyes

Such a celebration as I have never before espied

A Christmas party for the dead

And one mixed up of equal portions of conviviality and dread

And I stood helpless in that spot too panicked to even move

As I watched them dance and sway to the melodies of ancient Christmas tunes

And feast on things that weren’t really there

While I heard Merry Christmases being exchanged amongst

Their disembodied ranks quite everywhere

And though I said not a word they must have smelled my flop sweat

And so descended on me and so I too have joined the ever swelling ranks

Of the not exactly dead as if I had a choice on that night

When my Christmas present was a premature burial and an early death

Now every yuletide season I too join them in their eerie revels

So beware ye living if we catch you spying on our fun

Or you will soon go to the Devil

And when he’s done with you

You’ll sleep next to me in a nameless sepulcher

And then you will doze away each year until the night

That season’s greetings is most resoundingly said

In this place I now live in the city of the living dead

Frankenstein’s First Christmas

Ken L. Jones

I have too many birthdays to pick out just one

And Halloween was tailor made just for me

And yet what does all this Christmas talk mean

I’m hearing all the time

To the green stitched up creation of Dr. Frankenstein

To all the legion who comprise me

This season is at best a vague and jumbled memory

And besides as a composite I’m quite a new thing

So my first Christmas should befit a creature

Who was built to be mankind’s ruling king

Now what do we know of all this

Let me see it all has something to do with a tree

With shiny things upon it that are nice to see

And beneath it all manner of items

Wrapped up in pretty paper and ribbons and bows

And its best celebrated when there’s lots of snow

And then there’s that baby but what is that to me

I was born full grown and exactly as you see

And everyone is saying peace on Earth and goodwill to men

Does that apply to a collage of many graves who is as ugly as sin

And even if I wanted to what gift might I give

Perhaps I might be tempted to spare a life

I might let the next one who persecutes me from our encounter live

Now let’s see what else I can recollect

They say the man this day is for came back from the dead

According to some reports it is said

Did he have a scientist cackling

Who called down the lightning to revive this lad

Or was he reanimated by some other method

And did his revival make him sad

Now all of this just hurts my head

And I doubt if I fit into any of it

Since I am the harbinger of all dread

And perhaps it would be best for all

If I hide high in the hills until all this passes by

Like some red and green clad blur

Dashing like a sleigh ride across the winter’s sky

Now please excuse me I feel a need to cry

And to be alone but when Christmas is done

Stay close to your home

And lock the doors and the windows too

For once again I will be on the prowl for yours and you

But until that happens enjoy this amnesty

Because peace to you is my bequest

For something about Christmas resonates

Deep even in me the wretch

Who wishes all the time

With all of his crazy quilt of souls

That he had never been reborn

But probably never more I’m guessing so

Than on this fast approaching Christmas morn

A Midnight Christmas Feast

Ken L. Jones

One deep snow of an eggnog night

As batwings spread against a frosty moon

Man sized was the burden that they bore

And as this night dancer touched down

By a home snowbound 

Holiday revelry echoed from within

Propelled by a punch bowl of festive gin

And once the stranger had been personally invited within

By the mistress of the house

He carefully avoided every mirror

And the wall mounted crucifix that was there

No offered hors d'oeuvre crossed his lips

He turned down wine in a Santa cup

And then when all the revelers had drifted

Back to their far off comfy hibernations

He stepped out of the expanding living room shadows

And set about his intended labors

Alone with the beautiful hostess was he

And he mesmerized her as he approached her

Near the floor bound Nativity

Then by the light of the pulsating tree

Canine fangs found her icy white perfect neck

And then the libations he craved most were quaffed at length

Now never had he drank such blood

So over the limit so thick with fermented sludge

And by the time the deed was done

He was indeed drunker than any skunk

Then from the house he reeled and staggered

Three sheets to the wind as they used to say

And realized that he was too crocked to fly away

Then he looked for further nourishment to sober him up

From his inebriated roundelay

Then through his haze he spied

The outline of a man in the distant shadows

Standing still and oblivious to his plan

And hoping this new plasma might have the effect

Of several cups of hot black coffee

He drunkenly reeled up on the stranger

And gave his jugular a popping

But then to the humanoid bat’s great surprise

Nothing expected awaited him in that neck

Only the coldest meal he had ever heard of

Even more frigid than the storming weather that raged on yet

And as he tried to get away and found that he could not

He remembered a yuletide movie he had in former pre-vampiric days seen

That had a boy named Flick who had stuck his tongue

To a frozen pole and could not get away

And then the undead nether creature laughed bitterly

As he realized that he too had done something similar

But didn’t exactly understand why

His victim he had so poorly chosen

Was holding him prisoner by and by

And then hours later when the first rays of the sun

Revealed the vampire’s serious and last mistake

Was a jolly snowman he had tried to vamp

Instead of a party straggler who had forgotten to stumble away

And all this proved deadlier to him than holy water or a wooden stake

For as the sun all red and angry cut him to ribbons then to dust

He cursed aloud all hard drinking humans

All snowmen and his own insatiable blood lust

Then seconds later he was gone

Blown away by a whistling wind

With only his two animalistic fangs

To the hilt still buried in the snowman’s rock hard frigid neck

As proof that some feasts are neither meant for bats nor men nor beast

The Twelve Years of Christmas

Ken L. Jones

Hey lady I’ve never met you but you seem to be alive

Here’s my story fast and quick and none of it’s a lie

Now anytime the world ends can’t be good

But why I ask you why

Did the whole outhouse have to go up

Just days short of Christmas time

Now zombies were just some Halloween thing prior to this to me

I never gave them much thought when I wasn’t watching AMC

But the reality of all this is much worse

Than anything that George Romero ever filmed

And since the whole world froze on its axis at December time

Christmas every day is far from being a thrill 

And that kind of ticks me off because that used to be

Something I was into as a childhood fantasy

But I never imagined that it would be accompanied by

A symphony of hungry shuffling dead

Who want to feast on me after they rip off my head 

And all of this now mocks me and robs me of any Christmas spirit I ever had

So never wish me happy holidays it would only make me mad

And to think that I used to carp about over decorated houses

And too long department store lines

But now these days I’ve got things much more primal that occupy my mind

Like staying one step ahead of the thousands

Who think that they might find

My brain to be the perfect main course

For their endless Christmas dine

And if my double o-negative blood served as their mulled wine

They’d think it quite a winner

But I just want to barf at the notion of being someone’s dinner

Now who would have thought that some long ago Mayan

Was right with his stone calendar prophesies

That the world could really end at Christmas time

And why did one of the last ones standing have to be little old me

And because of it I’ve went from being a George Bailey

To an Ebenezer Scrooge in just twelve short years

Because everywhere I turn now

There is a nightmare before Christmas

Multiplied tenfold waiting for me there

And if the zombie Santa from our mall

Ever shows up and tries to lay a Red Ryder BB gun on me

Like the one that the old man gave to his son cute little Ralphie

I’ll use it instead to shoot his eye right out

And I’ll do it with much glee

Then maybe I’ll bash his forehead right in with a stale fruit cake

Because there’s plenty of them left lying around

Or maybe I’ll just use some twinkle lights to electrocute him like he was Uncle Lewis’s cat

As he makes funny gurgling sounds like a mouse trapped rat

Oh yeah I guess that would required some electricity but we’re fresh out of that

It sure shows how smart you are

That you approached me with such caution and such care

Because I’m much meaner than the Grinch

And Old Man Potter rolled into one

And not embarrassed about expressing it anywhere

And you can bet I’m gonna survive all this

Yes Virginia you can count on that

Because in this world of too many creatures a’stirring I never turn my back

And now it’s time to tender my Feliz Navidad’s

To the approaching mumbling hordes

So if you care to join right in with me

It’s good to have you abroad

And although it’s going to be one hell of a Christmas

I still say praise the Lord

And pass the ammunition

And help a new world come to be

And when we are the last ones left alive

We will make like Adam and like Eve

Only this time let’s make sure that we don’t plant any Christmas trees

 

The Holly And The Buried

Ken L. Jones

As I walk down the snow flurry sidewalks

There’s something strange about the Christmas shoppers that I meet

Some of them I haven’t seen for many a yuletide season

And some of them I have heard were long deceased

Why is everything so black and white here

With the hazy gravity of a dream

And why is all this so oddly familiar

And yet not quite right in ways I refuse to believe

A begging Santa who doesn’t look quite kosher

Bears more than a passing resemblance to someone I know

Is that William S. Burroughs from The Junky’s Christmas

Pumping that hand bell as he growls ho,ho,ho

And the further I walk the more unreal it gets

Until I doubt that I am still in my right mind

What happened to candy cane dreams and sugar plum visions

Perhaps I guess that is for other imaginations than mine 

Ones that with horror and the macabre

Their daylight hours do not fill because when I close my eyes

From a day of creating such labors

What else should I suspect might be awaiting me

In Morpheus’s fecund fields 

And yet all of this is a gift of a kind

A stocking stuffer that I would never re-gift or exchange

For it gives me such things to write about

As befit my transplanted brain

And so I will continue to share with you

All that about this season might be strange or scary

As between Joyeux Noel and the outré I broker a most unholy marriage

My Love For You Is As Red As Blood

As Green As Mold And Decay

Ken L. Jones

It’s midnight on December twenty-forth

And bells are ringing in every steeple

And while most would rather be

With the still moving people

I prefer to sit by you here

This stone bench is awfully cold

The snowflakes are bigger than any I’ve ever seen

And yet I doubt very much that they are larger

Than my throbbing grief

And there is only one place I would rather be

nd that is six feet under this earth

With your skeletal arms wrapped tightly around me

As our love finds a new rebirth

Your absence haunts me the whole year round

I long to join you every day

And yet as the yuletide rolls around

There is nothing festive about it

All is gray and so the barrel of my pistol

Will this night my candy cane be

As I give myself a final present

That could not be left by Santa

Under any decorated tree

Just one twitch of my trigger finger

Then this pawnshop gift I bought myself

Will sing to me the sweetest carol

As it rests me like a merry gentleman

With the contents of its barrel

What Hath This Season Conjured Up?

Ken L. Jones

There is a house on a crumbling cliff

A mansion some would say

That’s been deserted over a century now

And is slowly rotting away

The family graveyard and the weeds tall and overgrown

Make it as long deserted and yet

On every Christmas Eve the old place takes a deep breathe

Then it sparkles and it shimmers

Then all who are trapped behind its walls

To renewed vigor they do shiver

For even ghosts love Christmas Eve

If you don’t believe me

Ask old Jacob Marley

Who was known to clank a mournful chain

To invite a miser to be more open hearted and to party

And such a fete at this old place then happens

And for just the briefest of times

Those trapped and left behind are glad

As they wine and dine

And remember the December 25’s

Of their earthly days until too soon comes the sun

And then they blow away like Autumn leaves

Whispering Merry Christmas to everyone

Even A Season That Is Pure At Heart

Ken L. Jones

The full moon rises on our town

Counterpointing the huge lit tree

In old town square

While Christmas carolers stroll past

Unusually long houred shops

And hustling bustle is everywhere

All is perfect like a Norman Rockwell cover

And then is heard the noise that would better make

A sound track for the October time that is now weeks far away

A savage snarling like a beast

Yet it also sounds like a man

Tormented by all that he craves

Yet unable to stay his own hand

Then comes the ripping

Comes the screams

From a darkened alleyway nearby

Where bums gather in their cardboard crates

And drink their rot gut rye

And as much as we might like to think otherwise

This year it won’t be Santa Claus

Scrambling down our chimneys smoking

But something with real claws and fangs

And by God it isn’t joking

So melt down your silver bells into silver bullets fast

Bolt the doors hide the children in the basement

For a werewolf has come to our yuletide town

For his Christmas Eve repast

And brought with him a hunger most impatient